SPELL TO UNBIND, A

by Laurie, Victoria

  Legend also said that upon Guinevere’s death, Lunatrabem was placed into her headstone by Merlin at the request of Longinus, who knew that if the sword ever fell into the wrong hands, such as loyalists of Morgana, the free men and women of the world would be in grave peril.

  Since no one but Guinevere’s descendants knew where she and King Arthur were buried, the whereabouts of the sword were lost to time.

  Turning to Finn again, I asked, “How the hell did Petra come into possession of Lunatrabem?”

  No way could any descendant of Guinevere’s allow the sword to fall into Petra Dobromila Ostergaard’s hands. Certainly Elric never would’ve allowed it, because with Moonbeam in her exquisitely lethal hands, there would be no limit to the wreckage she could forge.

  Finn dipped his chin and looked at me with half-lidded eyes. “Sigourney Astoré,” he said. “Direct descendant of King Arthur and Guinevere.”

  I gasped. “Tic’s father?”

  “Yep.”

  I turned to stare out the windshield, stunned by the series of revelations, so it took me a minute to note that we were approaching a huge rock wall at the base of a bluff with no clear sign of an exit. Still, my mind continued to grapple with the knowledge that Petra had been in possession of Lunatrabem for all these years and hadn’t wielded it against Elric and his forces to gain control of the continent. The idea was unfathomable to me. Why had she held back?

  “Why would your boss toss this in the trash heap?” I demanded, holding tighter to the ancient, magical weapon.

  “She didn’t toss it,” he said. “She put it there for safekeeping.”

  “Safekeeping?” I repeated. “Safekeeping from whom?”

  Finn tapped a button on the top of his console, and a section of the rock wall began to move to the side, exposing a hidden tunnel. “From thieves like you,” he said

  I blinked at him. None of this made sense. “If Petra had the sword, why didn’t she just use it to reign over the whole territory?”

  “Because she couldn’t,” he answered, accelerating forward quickly when the wall had opened up enough to let us through.

  “Why?” I pressed while Finn braked long enough to press the button again and close the exit, all the while keeping a nervous gaze on the rearview mirror.

  When we started moving again, he finally answered me. “Because, until about ten minutes ago, Esmé, it was stuck in two tons of stone. You’re the first person in fifteen hundred years to wield it freely.”

  My jaw fell open for a third and final time, and for the next several minutes, it remained that way.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Day 3

  Finn drove us along the darkened tunnel, and the tense set of his shoulders didn’t relax until we were at least a quarter mile away from the exit.

  At last I found my voice. “So what does it mean that I was able to free the sword?”

  Finn sighed. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Other than it makes you the protector of the realm.”

  “And by the realm, you mean Tic,” I said, with no small hint of irritation.

  “Yep,” Finn said.

  “Son of a bitch,” I muttered, setting the sword to lay against the seat. “Leave it to Marco to drag me further into Petra’s politics and make things extra sticky with Elric.”

  Finn snorted. “Having possession of the sword wouldn’t be something I’d be broadcasting, Esmé. Especially not to Elric. He’d kill for it.”

  “For sure he’d kill for it,” I agreed. And then I had a thought. “What if I just gave the sword to Tic? I mean, it’s rightfully his anyway.”

  “Marco tried for years to pull that thing out of the stone. If it belonged to him, it would’ve released itself into his grasp long before now.”

  “Still,” I insisted. “What if I just handed it over? I mean, he’d be bound to keep it safe, right? He wouldn’t be able to sell it or trade it, and it’d help him put up a defense against his mother and Elric should either one of them decide he’d be better off hanging out with his dead father.”

  “Petra would use Marco’s possession of the sword to declare war on Elric. She’d send him up against her husband in a duel and, even armed with Lunatrabem, it’s supremely doubtful that Marco would come out the winner. Elric would then rightfully hold possession, and that wouldn’t be great for any of us.”

  “Least of all you,” I said. As Petra’s lieutenant, Finn would have to represent her in any battle or duel against Elric.

  “Least of all me,” Finn agreed.

  “So what the hell am I supposed to do with it?”

  “I suggest you keep it close until we find Marco, and then keep it very, very well-hidden.”

  I eyed Finn skeptically. “You won’t tell anyone I have it?”

  “Who would I tell?”

  I rolled my eyes. “I dunno, maybe your boss?”

  Finn chuckled. “She’s the last person I’d tell. Besides, right now Petra’s trying to kill me.”

  “Oh, yeah. Almost forgot. Why is that though?”

  Finn shrugged. “She ordered you dead, and here you are alive and in my company. Sipowicz would’ve sent video over before he even made us aware that he was in the parking garage and, if I know Petra, which I do, the second she saw the video, she became convinced I’ve turned traitor.”

  I grimaced. “What’ll you do?”

  “Same as before. Find Marco and show Petra that I was just being strategic by enlisting your help.”

  “That’ll work?”

  Finn shrugged again. “It’s all I’ve got at this point.”

  We came to the end of the tunnel and I thought we were going to drive out, but Finn braked and put the SUV into park.

  “What’s the plan?” I asked.

  Finn lowered his window. “The plan is to make sure we’re not heading into a trap.”

  I glanced out the windshield again at the faint light of the night beyond the tunnel. Nothing moved or looked suspicious, however, I thought his suggestion was wise.

  He made a soft whistling sound, and something from the shadows fluttered into view. Finn stuck his arm out of the window, holding out two stiff fingers as a makeshift perch.

  What I thought was a bird landed upside down on his fingers, but as I looked more closely, I quickly realized that the small creature was a bat.

  I have a thing for bats. I find them fascinating—cute even. This little guy was no exception. He made a few high-pitched squeaking sounds, and Finn brought his hand with the bat carefully inside the cab. “Binks, meet Esmé. Esmé, Binks.”

  I smiled. “Hey buddy,” I cooed, craning my neck to look at the bat’s face. “You’re a cute little guy, ain’tcha?”

  That got me a squeak.

  Finn pointed to the glove box. “There’re some dried cherries in there. Would you fish a few out for him?”

  I did as he asked and pulled up the bag, handing over three to Finn so he could feed the little bat.

  Binks chomped hungrily on the cherries until he’d had his fill. Then Finn lifted his fingers to eye level and said, “Okay, buddy, you know the drill. Scout the area and come tell me if anyone’s out there, okay?”

  Finn moved his hand carefully through the window again, and the bat took off.

  We sat in silence for a bit, my mind still whirling with the implications of having drawn Lunatrabem out of Guinevere’s headstone, which’d no doubt been buried under a pile of trinkets obscuring it from view.

  “How did you see the sword anyway?” Finn asked, breaking the silence.

  “It was sticking out of the pile,” I said cautiously.

  Finn frowned. “That pile was thirty feet high. How the hell could you see it from the ground?”

  “You sound like you doubt my story.”

  “I do doubt your story. I put the damn sword there myself and made sure it couldn’t be seen from the ground.”

  “Hid it in plain sight, huh?”

  “Yes,” he said simply.

 
I shrugged and then decided to give him a version of the truth. “The cruellion boxed me in, and my only move was to make it up to the top of the pile. I had no idea there was a sword of power up there, I just wanted to get to the top and hopefully stay out of the beast’s reach. When I got there, I tripped over the hilt, and noticed it was a weapon I might be able to use, so I pulled it free, and you know the rest.”

  Finn made a grunting noise, and I could tell my story was plausible. No way was I going to mention the monocle and the radiant light the sword had been giving off. To further distract him, I changed topics. “Do you think the sword might be the reason Tic was abducted?”

  Without looking at me, Finn replied, “I do. Or at least it was a reason.”

  “Did Marco know where you guys hid the sword?”

  “No. If Marco knew where the sword was kept, he would’ve auctioned off the information to the highest bidder, and trust me, cruellion on guard or not, he would’ve made a hefty profit for that information.”

  “Then who knows that Tic is the direct descendant of Arthur and Guinevere and would’ve abducted him to try to get to the sword?”

  “There aren’t a lot of mystics left alive who would know. Petra made sure to kill anyone who could’ve been suspicious of Sigourney’s connection to the realm. And even she only ascertained the truth when she discovered Arthur’s crest on the underside of Sigourney’s foot.”

  I nodded. “The famous King Arthur birthmark.”

  All true descendants of the realm were born with a birthmark that began as a red blob, but over time it would morph into a golden dragon—the crest of King Arthur.

  “Yep.”

  “I’m assuming Tic has a birthmark too?”

  “He does.”

  “Where?”

  “He’s also got one on the underside of his foot. That’s why you’ll never catch him barefoot.”

  I actually had noticed that about Tic. Even on the hottest summer days, that man was always wearing shoes and socks. I’d always chalked it up to one more weird thing about a weird little man.

  “Could Tic’s girlfriend have known?”

  “Bree?”

  “Yeah.”

  Finn shrugged. “I doubt it. The last time Petra checked Marco’s birthmark, it was still red and only hinting at the shape of a dragon.”

  “She checks his birthmark?” The idea was a bit too Oedipal for my taste.

  Finn smirked. “She does. The more it reflects the crest, the more in danger Marco is of being discovered as Arthur’s descendant. The last thing Petra wants is for Marco to end up being murdered over it.”

  “I never knew she cared so much about her son,” I admitted.

  “She doesn’t. She cares about sticking it to Elric. She uses Marco to needle him because she knows she can get away with it. Elric’s not going to murder Marco and start a war. He’s not going to let Petra think it bothers him enough to do that.”

  I agreed. Elric didn’t need that kind of headache. “But if Elric found out that Marco was a descendant of the realm, all bets would be off, right?”

  “They would. There are still plenty of powerful mystics willing to unite behind the descendant of Merlin’s favorite king.”

  I sighed. “Then who could’ve known?”

  “Beats the hell out of me.”

  I tapped my thigh with my index finger, trying to puzzle it all out. “The bigger question is, what does Grigori Rasputin have to do with any of this?”

  Finn shifted in his seat, his gaze steadily looking out the windshield, but he seemed to be having an internal argument with himself.

  “What?” I asked.

  Finn scowled, as if he’d just decided which voice won the argument in his mind. “Grigori was making a power play.”

  “Meaning?”

  “He was here, I suspect, because he was after something that we took from him a year ago.”

  “Something you took from him?” I asked carefully. “Are you talking about the egg?”

  “No,” Finn said. “Last year, a source of Petra’s discovered Grigori might be in London. We deployed five of our best thieves to retrieve the egg. Only one survived. Grigori killed the other four. He managed to sneak off with the egg, but not before our thief took something of great value to him and something of immense power. Something he’d been using the egg to create.”

  My brow furrowed. “Using the egg to create? What does that mean?” As far as I knew, Grigori wasn’t a merlin.

  “It means, he was using the egg to build himself a succubaen.”

  I sucked in a breath. “Holy shit!”

  Succubaen were illegal in the mystic world, which wasn’t much of a deterrent, but the actual act of creating a succubaen was sufficient enough to deter even the most earnest mystic—or merlin—from attempting to create one.

  Derived from an ancient dark magic, a succubaen was a trinket that quite literally killed you while also giving you one clue to discover the thing you most desired. Every time it killed you, the succubaen rose up a level or two, depending on how powerful you were at the start. If you were able to come back from the dead, you’d have just one clue toward the thing that you most desired. You could use that clue to try to suss out the location of the object of your desire or the answer to your quest, but if you didn’t succeed, you’d need to use the succubaen all over again and risk not coming back from the dead.

  I’d once whimsically entertained the idea of creating a succubaen to find the mystic hag that’d bound me, but the problem with that was that I didn’t yet possess the magical skills it took to craft such a powerful trinket, and the fact that every time a succubaen took your life, if you managed to be revived, you came back a little less sane and forever lost a part of your soul to the dark magic side of our realm, a place of significant evil and destruction.

  Still, succubaen had long been thought to be the ultimate gateway to discovering the exact location of the phoenix, but it would literally take six or seven lives to receive enough clues to track her down, and at the end of those lives any mystic still standing would be a slave to dark magic, which is why none of the Seven had ever tried it. The sacrifice wasn’t worth the prize.

  In fact, after the last Great Mystic War, the Seven had formed a pact—bound by magic—never to create a succubaen for their own purposes or force one of the mystics in their courts to use it on their behalf. As such, anyone caught creating or using a succubaen was executed on the spot. They were that dangerous.

  But Grigori had thought it worth the risk and he’d had both the magical skill to create one and at least six or seven lives to spend to find not only Ember’s exact location, but also what to look for once he discovered my warehouse.

  So now I understood what had brought Grigori Rasputin to a city where he might easily be discovered. No doubt he’d figured out who’d stolen the succubaen from him and wanted it back, but the most recent clue it’d likely given him was where to locate the book that identified the phoenix as an ember-colored dog. By being here the old mystic was killing two birds with one stone.

  “You think Grigori was here to steal back his own trinket?” I asked Finn.

  Finn’s gaze lifted a bit as he stared out the windshield, and mine did too. A fluttering movement had caught both of our attention. Binks was back.

  “I do,” he said, rolling down the window and sticking out his hand again.

  “How much power had he given the trinket when you stole it from him?”

  “He’d brought it up to level five, give or take,” Finn said, just as Binks landed in his hand, upside down again.

  “So Grigori had used up, what? Two to three of the egg’s lives to get the succubaen to that point?”

  Finn nodded. “Two for sure, maybe a third. But that would’ve left him with only one or two egg uses left.”

  “Where’s the succubaen now?” I asked, hoping like hell it was behind us in the junkyard.

  Finn didn’t answer me. He simply fed Binks another cherry. The b
at took the treat, greedily gobbling it up, issuing several squeaks as he did so.

  Extending his hand out the window again, Finn said, “Thanks, buddy.”

  The bat flew off and Finn rolled up the window, putting the Escalade into drive. “The coast is clear,” he said.

  We began to drive out of the tunnel when I pressed Finn for an answer to my question. “I’m assuming the cruellion is guarding the succubaen. Like the sword, it’s also buried in a pile of junk, right?”

  The sword had been the only thing my monocle had recognized as holding any kind of power, but there’d been acres of trinket piles back there, so Grigori’s trinket could well have been buried in one of the hundreds of other heaps I hadn’t looked at through the crystal.

  “It’s somewhere safe,” Finn said.

  “Good,” I said, intending to drop it.

  But then I had another, quite terrible thought. The memory of the little glass cruet with the stopper on Grigori’s mantle came back to me. I remembered looking into it and seeing the mystic who’d bound me while hearing the beginnings of what I knew would be a clue to discovering her.

  I then remembered being sucked down a very dark hole as the succubaen had demanded my essence for the knowledge, and I’d resisted, so it’d knocked me out flat for several hours.

  I hadn’t realized it until that moment, but I’d been looking into what had to have been a succubaen. Nothing else made sense.

  And when I’d awakened, the succubaen had been taken.

  My blood ran cold.

  “Finn,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper.

  “Yeah?” he asked, distracted as he navigated the road in front of us with his lights off.

  “I think Grigori was working on a replacement.”

  He took his gaze off the road to eye me sharply. “What?”

  “When I was in Grigori’s house, right before your brother arrested me, I discovered a little trinket on his mantel that took me down a rabbit hole where the object of my deepest desire was shown to me like a carrot on a stick. It started to pull too much of my essence out of me though, so I resisted. Strongly. That’s when it knocked me out cold for several hours. When I came to, it was gone.”